“Oh the buzzy small horror movie. These have been so hit or miss for me. Loved It Follows, bored by The Witch, and Don’t Breathe fell in between. Yet I still jumped when I heard good things about It Comes At Night, despite the trailer never having really caught my attention. Turns out, I needn’t have bothered.
I couldn’t quite figure out how to describe the plot from what I knew about the movie, but hopefully having seen it, I can paint a clearer picture. A small family has confined themselves to a remote cabin in the woods, where they’re hiding out from some unknown plague that’s destroyed much of humanity, or at least that’s what they believe has happened. Another family crosses their path, and they bring them in, strength in numbers and all that. What follows has been described as a “”zombie movie without the zombies””, but to me it was a horror without the horror.
I’ll just flat out say, I didn’t find it scary or particularly suspenseful at all. I was bored (just like with The Witch). Things dragged out too slowly, and the threat wasn’t building as much as I’d have liked. What sucks though, is that I do see a very brilliant subtext they were working towards, but it’s completely lost if you can’t get into the movie.
What’s the subtext? The _true_ horror of the movie isn’t the fear of the unknown or the disease devouring society. The true horror comes from human nature, and not knowing who to trust or when to let your guard down. I totally got that that was the point the movie was trying to make, they just didn’t drive it home as hard as I think they could have. It could have gone way more psychological. It could have been scarier (without resorting to seeing those unknown outside forces). It just wasn’t.
It Comes at Night – \m/ \m/”